I was blessed to work in a classroom with a class set of fifteen iPads. This amount usually provided enough iPads for each pair of students in a class, with few exceptions. The Noyce program granted me access to a personal iPad for research and teaching purposes. I had limited experience, the bulk focused on applications (“apps”) relevant to class management, broad spectrums of biology content and few videos. I was determined to enrich my lessons and possibly management skills with the iPads and was fortunate to receive guided instruction by my cooperating teacher.
The first accomplishment with the iPads was addressing the issue of equity in the classroom. For instance, students in any classroom are expected to see the board from their seats. Some students who sit in the far back of the room may have trouble gaining access to the information on the board and are therefore at a disadvantage. There is currently an application available on the iPad named “Joinme” which allows any computer screen to be shared with another computing device by assigning a specific code to the viewer. In the classroom, we equipped each iPad with the application and assigned the students a code to enter into the iPad at their table. The iPads were then synced to the projector screen and any student from around the room could see the board’s contents on their iPad. Students no longer had to stretch their necks or squint their eyes to see the board since the content was now accessible from their table. This application was used for multiple purposes, teaching material with notes, showing the students their hand-outs and going along with them on the instructions, modeling demonstrations. Students now had access to all the information we wanted them to see right at their tables with fewer interferences and distractions. The primary purpose was for note taking purposes. The application showed any PowerPoint presentations onto the student’s iPads but restricted their ability to edit any information on the notes. Therefore, students were going along with the PowerPoint presentation and could see the notes from their desk, speeding up the note taking process. Students also had the ability to “zoom in” on any pertinent information that needed a closer look. For example, students could zoom in on a part of an image while that specific content was explained in the notes simultaneously. This feature also helped students who were spatially unaware or sight impaired when it came to focusing on specific images. The secondary method of using the “joinme” application on the iPads was for pointing our specific instructions for student work. The document and my hands would be projected onto the main class board via the projector. The students would have the physical handout in front of them as well as a live video feed of me interacting with the document. I would point to specific sections of the student handout and provide detailed instructions with correlating gestures to the document for reinforcement. While teachers already provide explicit instructions for student work, the iPads gave the students the ability to visually see, verbally hear, and kinesthetically interact with the handout’s intentions, making the directions and expectations more clear. This method also provides multiple ways for the students to receive instruction, possibly solidifying the intended instructions. This application proved to be extensively useful in conveying information and managing transitions and routines in the classroom.
There are also hundreds of applications on the iPads that align specifically with biology and anatomy content. Filtering through the applications to ensure the content was appropriate was somewhat difficult but very rewarding when accomplished. During the unit on cells, a lot of the information was review from middle school and therefore did not need sufficient re-teaching. My cooperating teacher and I believed it would be great for the students to have a self-driven lesson using the ipads to review the contents of cell physiology. First, the students used the Kahn Academy Application to hear a short lecture on the products cells make. Students were given a sheet to draw and notate any important information from the Kahn video. The students then spent the remainder of the class working on a packet to review cell physiology. The packet went along with information found in an application called iCell. This interactive application allowed students to explore the organelles of different cell types in as little or as much detail as they preferred. This provided a great way to differentiate the material to students who were more interested or having more problems with the material. While the class period was very technology heavy, the students did a great job getting all of the material and staying on task.